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Students will relate musical and poetic vocabulary. They will identify specific tempos and dynamics of musical excerpts from the San Francisco Symphony's Kids Website which correspond best to word pattern and meter of a chosen poem. Students will show understanding through reading/reciting their poem to appropriate background music.

Students develop reading fluency and comprehension in nonfiction text as they learn about the period of time from post-Civil War to the 1930s. Students take notes and complete a finished project in the form of a slideshow to create art work, import pictures, and type text about the person they studied and music from a composer who lived during the same time period. The finished slideshow shares information and pictures about the person they studied, has transitions, and music from a famous composer.

Students will learn about dynamics, tempo, acoustics and instruments in the music of Charles Ives. Students will be introduced to and learn about the literary term onomatopoeia, and how it can relate to the sounds composed by Ives in The Unanswered Question, Central Park in the Dark and Symphony No 4. Students will then relate the literary term to musical expression. Making the connection between literacy and music, students will create their own musical onomatopoeias using various media, such as watercolor, tempera paint, crayons, magazine text and markers.

Students will listen to Civil War era music composed by nineteenth century composers from the North and from the South. The objective of this lesson will be for students to practice forming sentences which compare ideas using correlative conjunctions, coordinating conjunctions, and/or specialized prepositions (during, while, from, to). Students will describe both pieces of music. The teacher will create a Venn diagram using the students' descriptions. Students will connect ideas using sentence frames provided by the teacher.

This lesson plan was developed for three- to five-year old developmentally delayed students. It is a very simplified study of the three movements of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons: Spring. The three movements demonstrate the tempos of allegro and largo, and provide opportunity for children to move in dance and play rhythm instruments to the music and the words of Vivaldi's sonnets. Varied art activities, nature walks and children's literature about spring and the weather are an integral part of the lesson.

Students examine the role of music and dance in the lives of early colonists. Students will begin to learn the steps to the Virginia Reel without any music. The dance is performed to many tunes. After listening to several selections, students discuss and choose one tune to which they will dance during the Fifth Grade Colonial Days Celebration. The discussion should show students' understanding of colonial life and culture and influences that shaped it.

Students will recognize the instruments of the orchestra from sight and sound by utilizing the www.sfskids.org website. They will compare the sounds of different instruments and learn to classify them into four families. Students will make their own fabric square to be sewn into a quilt that will be displayed in the classroom.

Students will understand the qualities of jazz and connect the music to The Great Gatsby, namely Fitzgerald’s writing style and his words. Students will also make a final determination whether jazz is a representation of social status and class.

Students will listen to musical selections on the San Francisco Symphony's Kids website. Students will be able to select musical selections that match the mood and tone of a literary piece through examples and explanation.

Students will determine moods created by a piece of music and will analyze how the composer created the feelings. Students will determine the character traits/moods of story characters by analyzing the adjectives, adverbs, and verbs used by the author. Finally, students will determine which piece of music best represents the characters from a story.

Students will be introduced to the great jazz composer and band leader, Duke Ellington by listening to his re-composed, re-orchestrated version of Nutcracker Suite by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, following a previously taught thematic lesson about Tchaikovsky's classic. Students use there prior knowledge of musical concepts and the instrumentation of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite to recognize similar melodies in Ellington's work to that of Tchaikovsky. Share and Discuss >View Lesson Plan (PDF 0.1MB)